If you were to swap building permits for cowboys and Louis Vuitton for the local sheriff, you’d come up with Beijing, the new Wild East

In the old days, pioneers and fortune seekers would endure harsh country, painstaking travel and rudimentary meals for the promise of the riches of the frontier in the Wild West. A new gold rush has emerged, and while the allure of fast money still draws people from far and wide, the only hardship is a 12-hour flight from Vancouver to Beijing - the new Dodge City. The city has been on a crash course to reinvent itself, since landing the 2008 Olympics, from foreboding communist bulwark to cutting-edge cultural capital. Even before touchdown, I’m introduced to the scale of this rebirth through an eruption of construction abutting the tarmac. The new airport terminal is a labyrinth of steel beams and scaffolding sprawling to infinity in each direction. There are, by my count, 35 cranes at work. The site is so large that I wonder whether the runways will be located indoors.